2025 Bulbs, Part 2 - or - oops, all macro lens shots

There's no unifying theme for these images. This walk is actually the week before the last bulb post, and while it's obvious the light was still pretty flat, you can tell there's more color present in these shots. Rosid trees were in bloom, though no significant representation from cherries. As tends to be the case, though, the bulb flowers received more of my attention. These little narcissus flowers (via 100mm macro) are showing the little bit of moisture that remained from perhaps watering that morning.

This narcissus was in a much earlier-blooming stand of flowers, from what I remember. My memory is a little hazy on them, but near this photo, I have one of a blossom that was quite thoroughly slug-eaten, and in my experience with my day-lilies at home, the slugs take a little while to find a bed in bloom. This flower escaped the attention of the slugs, but not the ants.

These two tulips were about to open. I was taken with the fact that it looked like they were doing so together, as a pair. It made for a nice scene, though if I ever print this one, it'll be 8x10 - I only just now saw I failed to frame without the garden sign in the background.

I felt like this was the star of the day, though. I don't often get a chance to make interesting images where the subject is centered in the frame, but every once in a while works for me.

Interestingly enough, all four of the images I selected to represent this walk are from my 100 macro. I am not sure what lenses I actually took on the walk, but only three are represented in the 54 images i uploaded for the day - I shot one image through my 14mm, five images through the 20-40 zoom which I adore, and the entire remainder are the macro. Pentax's 100mm AW macro has become a really common carry for me on both APS-C and 135. My travel kit, if I get three lenses, is 16-85, 55-300, and the macro. If I'm doing a walkaround, I'll select a kit that makes sense for the weather, but the one overlap, regardless of if I'm doing ultrawide+standard zoom or array-o'-primes will be the 100. It's small, light, and does two things really well: 1:1 macro and middle-distance portraiture for flowers, like on this post. Traditionally, my go-to for the latter has been the 77mm f1.8 Limited lens, which I still absolutely adore... but that lens carries the penalty of lack of weather sealing, and would usually leave me without close-focus capability.